I met Josh Adams during 24-Hour Comic Day a few years back at Jim Hanley's Universe. There were about 10 of us masochists slogging through our attempt to conceptualize, write, and illustrate a full-length (24-page) comic in 24 hours. Josh wore sunglasses the entire time and did a heavily inked piece about a boxer. My right-hand man on Division 18, Jeremy Donelson, drew a funny piece about a gang of crooks who go by the name of S.C.U.M. I did a weird existential comic about a comic, with me as the lead character drawing it, deviating through different genres and ideas that I, in the story, scrap after 3 or 4 pages before starting over. I think mine was the best, but Hanley's never collected them into an anthology like they promised, so I haven't seen the works side by side since. (I think Jeremy may have our pages, though...may be good for a future post, if I can get a hold of them.)
Anyway, it was a fun night, and I regret not getting a chance to do it again since. And I can't help but be amused by my memories of the one kid who spent about 10 of those 24 hours ranting and raving about his love for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Vito Delsante--the shop manager and an accomplished comic creator himself--blasting Appetite for Destruction over and over until our sweaty crew of hunchbacked artists had no choice but to sing along, or how, at about midnight, Neal Adams walked into the shop with enough buckets of KFC to feed our tiny geek army twice over, and I thought he was just some random guy...a friend of the store coming in to take care of the comic kids. I didn't recognize him as Holy Shit Neal Adams!, let alone have any clue that he was the punk in the aviator's dad.
But Josh and I are pals now. We bounce ideas off each other over IM throughout the day almost every day. Since I have no money to fund his efforts and he's a professional, the projects we've been cooking always get back-burnered for paying gigs, but that just means we have more time to pace ourselves, learn new things, and refine them. I've learned more about comics from this damn kid than I ever did working on D18 or collaborating with the DCC crew.
The point of all this is that Josh has a new column at Bleeding Cool, in which he plans to share some of his big ideas, insider anecdotes, and crazy ambition. I'm hoping he'll write a column about our (rejected) pitch to reboot The Challengers of the Unknown, which even I knew we had some serious balls to think DC would ever consider.
So...go read his piece and find out What Josh Would Do.
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